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The Brightlife: Adventures in Personal Development Welcome to The Brightlife and thanks for taking the time to read my blog. It reflects our fresh and quirky approach to "personal development with attitude" that gets positive outcomes and makes The Brightstuff consultancy unique. Your feedback is always welcome so if you have any comments or questions about The Brightlife, please CLICK HERE to email me. - James Moore, Director
Culture Shock
Coming Up For Air
August 31st 2011
Time And Time Again October 16th 2009
Most time management books will start by telling you that time is limited. That we all have the same sixty seconds a minute, sixty minutes an hour, twenty four hours a day and so on. Whilst it’s true that there are over thirty million seconds in a year, everyone experiences those moments in their own unique way. Not only that, our own experience of time can change according to what we’re doing and the state we’re in. Let’s go back to the eighties. Pixie boots, florescent shirts, sculptured hair. And that was just the guys! Duran Duran, ABC and Spandau Ballet on Top Of The Pops, all offering escape from dreary recession era Britain. And there was me, working part-time in ASDA, stacking the shelves of the wine section 3 nights a week for three months to get some extra cash whilst I was at college. Whilst the rest of my days flew by in a dayglo haze, the 4 hour shifts at work seemed to stretch out like an endless grey motorway. But without the service stations. Bored and operating on auto-pilot I was constantly clock watching. I started calculating how many minutes there were left till my shift ended. Then how many shifts I had left till my three months were up. And finally how many seconds there were until I was free again. My obsession with time seemed to make it stretch even further. I swear that the second hand on my watch would often appear to be stationery when I looked at it. Then one night after work, I saw a documentary that gave me a different perspective. An American soldier was interviewed about his time as a prisoner in Vietnam and how he withstood torture. He said that he had been trained so that in those moments his mind would transport him to the farms and cornfields where he grew up, to his friends and family, the familiar sights and sounds of his youth. Whilst working in ASDA may have seemed like torture to a bored teenager I realised that it was nothing compared to the soldiers experience. And that if he could escape something so horrible by shifting his attention, then anyone can. My last few shifts flew by as, still on auto-pilot, I set my thoughts free to focus on other more interesting things like girls and music. Now flash forward a couple of years to the mid-eighties. It’s late at night and I’ve just pulled off the motorway on to the quiet stretch of single carriage way that leads home. I know the road well - it cuts through several miles of countryside. There’s no other traffic and I’m doing sixty miles per hour. There are no lights, just the reflection of cat’s eyes in my headlamps, blinking back in a steady Morse code. Frankie Goes To Hollywood are singing Relax on the radio, the volume is high and the bass line pulsates through the speakers. I see shafts of light beaming out from a side road to my right as a hatchback pulls out in front of me, just yards ahead. Then everything goes r-e--a---l----l----y s------l-------o--------w. And very quiet. And strangely beautiful. The gold paintwork of the hatchback sparkles like jewellery as it s caught in my full beam. I see the front passenger looking straight into my eyes, their mouth open. And as I push hard on my brake pedal, and as I grip my steering wheel with both hands, slowly and elegantly the cars glide towards each other. As the hatchback turns, my car slides into its rear corner. My bonnet, which normally tapers down out of view, rears up as it crumples and folds in on itself. I calmly watch the red metal as it gradually compresses towards me like a concertina. Then I notice the hatchback lift off the ground, rear axle first and flip over, its red rear lights tracing an arc in the night sky. It continues this trajectory and as it turns over and sideways. Its headlights flash into my eyes then go out as the hatchback sinks into a ditch to the left of the carriageway. My car is motionless. Real time returns and I step out onto the road. I am struck by the stillness, the cool night air and the sharp smell of petrol. The only sound I hear is a single wheel spinning on the upperside of the hatchback. And then the crunching of the glass and the other debris underfoot as gingerly, I make my way to the other vehicle. Then thankfully I hear the groans of the people in the car. And time-speeds-up. Other cars pull up. People get out to help. Someone goes to call an ambulance. There are five students in the hatch back. They manage to climb out of the hole where the rear windscreen used to be. The ambulance arrives. No-one is seriously hurt. The collision had only taken a few seconds but had seemed to stretch out for minutes. My experience of it had been distanced and instead of being frightening it had a graceful, elegiac quality that was deeply anchored. Now, when faced with tight deadlines I find that by recalling that moment and state, I am able to complete much within a short space of time. Even whilst writing this piece. I don’t advocate crashing your car as an aid to time management – I just got lucky in every sense of the word. You can do it the easy way. By using NLP, it is possible to anchor states that distort time in your favour.
Fast or slow. The Stuff Of Nightmares September 8th 2009 Enjoying a late night drink with a friend recently, they suddenly went into panic mode and leapt up. In a frenzied state, he started a familiar dance of patting all the pockets on his jacket and jeans. Twice. Whilst jigging about he simultaneously scanned the room, the floor and under the chairs then produced his car key and rushed outside. He reappeared a few minutes later, the colour restored to his face, smiling and holding up his beloved i-phone. Knocking back his drink he told me that losing it was his “worst nightmare”. “Look”, I said, “I know much you love that thing and maybe one day you’ll marry it and have lots of baby devices but is that really the best you can do?” He gave me a “what?” look. “Surely you can come up with a better nightmare than losing your phone?” “But my entire life is on it.” “Even so, it’s hardly the stuff of Grimm’s fairy tales is it?” So I told him what my worst nightmare was. Spending a summer vacation in a remarkably cold summerhouse on the north Danish coast, I awoke in the middle of the night to find someone or more precisely something leaning over me. It was of zombie-like appearance, dressed in 19th century naval garb complete with stripy shirt and long-tailed coat. Its legs ended below the knee in long wooden stilts and its long arms were stretched out towards me. The tips of its fingers ended in crows beaks which were snapping at me in what sounded like Russian. As I sat up it suddenly grabbed my ankles, the beaks nibbling into my flesh and it began to pull me out of the bed. And then I really woke up. “You see,” I said to my friend, “now that’s a nightmare. What you’re talking about is something else”. “Okay,” they conceded, “it wouldn’t be my worst nightmare but it would be a monumental pain in the rear.” I raised an eyebrow. “Alright, it would just be a bunch of stuff that I’d have to sort out.” Of course if he hadn’t found his phone that night then it would have been his worst nightmare. But only because he had already chosen that outcome. He would have found plenty of evidence to support his view and no doubt get increasingly stressed. So what’s going on? Take a look around you and spend the next sixty seconds looking for anything that is brown, however large or small. Next, close your eyes and try to remember as many of them as possible. Okay, so how many did you get? We all subconsciously filter information – we have to in order to avoid being overloaded by all the stuff that surrounds us. The part of our brain that does this sorting is called the Reticular Activating System and it decides what is or isn’t useful to us based on our perceptions. In short, we notice the things that our attention is focused on. That’s why, when you decide to buy a new car, all of a sudden you start to see the very same model and colour everywhere you go. Now, without looking up, try and remember how many black things there are in your surroundings. Not so easy this time is it? The messages that you give yourself have a huge influence on your attitude and behaviour. By giving yourself better messages you can consciously focus your attention on things that will support your success. This way you can influence your Reticular Activating System to find even more of it. In short, better messages will get you better results. We spent the rest of the night discussing what might actually make good nightmares – stuff too gruesome to repeat here. After all, if you’re going to have them they might as well be ambitious. Incidentally, a few days after my own worst nightmare, I made a discovery in the local bibliotek. In the late 1800’s a Russian circus used to sail into the village we were staying at and perform on the site of our summerhouse. Sweet dreams.
August 6th 2009 Between flying off the Vespa and hitting the ground with a thud, I had a number of paradigm shifts: My confidence in the off-road capabilities of a scooter was misplaced, wearing a helmet is actually quite a good idea and road maps are not designed for crossing mountain ranges. In hindsight these sound like common sense but, just like Plato’s observation on beauty, paradigms are in the eye of the beholder. They are the way that we interpret our experiences based on our assumptions about ourselves and the space we inhabit. Our paradigms make up our internal map of the world, they are shaped by our values and beliefs. The word originates from the ancient Greek paradigma, which means pattern or example and was adopted by scientists in the twentieth century. Today it means the assumptions, perceptions, models, theories and frames of reference that we apply to our view of the world. Like maps, whilst our paradigms appear real but closer examination can reveal them to be impressionistic, highlighting only the landmarks that we are currently aware of or interested in. It is often said of paradigms that “the map is not the territory”, details are drawn based on where we place our attention and redrawn when our perceptions of the territory change. On our first holiday together my wife and I explored Rhodes, sharing a scooter and of course flaunting all the safety advice about helmets. After circumnavigating the island we became more adventurous and began making short forays into the mountain ranges. Looking at the map we had been given at the hire centre, we traced a route from coast to coast and decided to go for it. As we ascended, the road became a track, then a path, a rut and finally nothing but a field of dried, cracked mud. We looked at the map and the narrow yellow line that bridged the roads either side of the mountain. We looked back at the field, cursed the cartographer and decided we weren’t going to turn back after coming so far. A couple of kilometres of rough terrain later and... bump! We weren’t hurt and as we dusted ourselves down I reflected that next time we tried this we’d get a better map. The term paradigm shift was coined by Thomas Kuhn in his book, The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962. He demonstrated that every significant breakthrough in science had resulted from new ways of thinking where there had been a shift away from the old paradigms. This is what Albert Einstein meant when he said “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” Once we viewed the world as flat, we saw the earth as the centre of the universe and we thought all matter was solid. These were the paradigms of their time. Then Christopher Columbus sailed around the world without falling off and its shape was changed forever. Copernicus placed the sun at the centre of our universe and the relationship of the planets shifted too. Max Planck introduced the theory of quantum physics and classical science had to be reassessed. Paradigm shifts can come in many ways, from life changing events such as giving birth to small acts of unexpected kindness. You can even challenge limiting beliefs and replace them with more resourceful ones. You can learn to shift your own paradigms as easily as falling off a scooter.
And get yourself a better
map in the process. July 5th 2009
When I was working as a consultant in one organisation my remit was to review current practices and recommend ways of aligning the company’s systems and processes with its purpose. There are many parallels between organisational and personal behaviour and also between consulting and coaching. Companies are just as prone to follow the head rather than the heart and just as likely to become stuck due to limiting beliefs as people are. I embarked on a mission of discovery; wanting first to understand how the business operated and then ensure that we retained any existing processes of value. I questioned managers and board members and uncovered a level of attention to detail and bureaucracy that was almost obsessive. Not only were there rules for just about anything and everything, lots of them didn’t seem to make sense in the context of the company purpose. They had evolved with a strange self-serving logic all of their own. As I delved deeper into the organisation I found it hard find anyone who could explain how the culture had become so entrenched. I found it harder still to find those who were ready to let go. I empathised with the people I interviewed and was gradually drawn into their world. I became obsessed with trying to unravel the underpinning logic of what had gone before and frustrated when I couldn’t find one, spending ages collating and analysing data, looking for trends and deeper meaning. Then I watched Apocalypse Now and noticed that my own mission within the organisation was reflected in Captain Willard’s journey into the heart of darkness. The turning point for me was when Willard finally confronts Colonel Kurtz and is questioned about his brief. Willard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound. Kurtz: Are my methods unsound? Willard: I don't see any method at all, sir. I had a sudden realisation that many of the processes I had been reviewing were unsound and I had been wasting my time in trying to unravel them. There was no physical figure to assassinate, no Captain Kurtz, just an out-dated culture where control had stifled creativity and growth. The next morning I pinned Willard’s words above my desk and scrapped the analysis. I started with a fresh piece of paper and decided to create something new that was aligned with the company purpose. Energised by my revelation and released from the past, I achieved more in that day than the previous month. When you think about your life purpose, do you look backwards at what has gone before? Do you over-analyse mistakes? Do you look for hidden meaning in the things you don’t want? A new study has found that human heart cells renew themselves throughout our entire life. Writing your life purpose can be an act of renewal too. It is the opportunity to start afresh, to map out how you want to be in the rest of your life.
And to go forward and create
it. June 8th 2009 Early in my career I was promoted into a role with a company car. Having seldom driven since passing my test I was incredibly excited to have a car and the associated freedom of mobility. That was until the first time that a driver cut in front of me without warning. I had a sudden sense of shock and fear for what might have happened. I remember the rush of energy surging through my body, my heart pounding in my head and a tremendous sense of relief as I screamed and shook my fist. Expressing my anger certainly released some of the adrenaline rush I was experiencing and this was much better than trying to bottle it up. Right? Well yes, but… as my job then involved ridiculous amounts of driving I was experiencing these types of incident two or three times a day. In a short space of time I was getting really good at generating adrenaline and even better at being angry. I realised I wasn’t enjoying the driving any more and also that there was a serious risk to continuing with my behaviour. I decided to review my options. They were - a) get another job without the driving b) keep doing what I was doing now c) react in a way that was better for me I loved my job so option a) the passive response was a non-starter. And I wanted to have a long career. I did some rough sums and calculated that if I kept responding the way I had been, I’d be doing road rage 600 or more times a year. I didn’t need to check the medical stats to realise that the toll this would have on my wellbeing was conflicting with my desires for good health and a long career. So option b) the aggressive response was out too. I didn’t yet know specifically what option c) would be but I knew that the assertive choice was my best shot. Playing around with option c) I became more aware of what I was doing, even as I was doing it in the midst of an incident. As my self-awareness increased I realised that the venting of my frustration was a symptom of the problem but it wasn’t the cause. I had got really good at painting the “what if” scenarios in my mind, creating hyper-real images of colourful, tangled wreckage wrapped around me. But the body does not know the difference between a real experience and a vividly imagined one. My body had been responding to the films I was playing in my head, all the alternative realities I had created, rather than the reality in front of me. The fact is that none of my worst case scenarios had occurred. I was okay and hadn’t been physically hurt. Better still, my reflex actions in braking and other evasive action had been really good but I’d been too busy being angry to notice. I decided it was time to start creating some different images and to tell myself better stories. I came up with a simple reaction plan. When I had experienced a near miss in future, I would - 1. Congratulate myself on my responses 2. Tell myself “I’m OK” 3. Picture myself arriving at my destination, energised and unruffled I got mixed results on my first day. There were three incidents of which one I let go and the other two resulted in a fright response – one ending in a hand gesture. So I added another point to the plan - 4. If I don’t always get it right – I’ll keep practising till I do. The great thing about driving around London in the late eighties was that it offered lots of opportunity to practice! It took about a month of conscious effort and probably around 50 incidents before I started to get good at “letting go”. It then took a couple more months to get to the point that it wasn’t even a conscious response. In the next twenty years I managed to drive over half a million miles, the equivalent of going to the moon and back and whilst I don’t claim to be perfect, I can only remember a handful of incidents where I didn’t make my preferred choice. By focussing on what you can control in a situation rather that what you can’t, your options begin to open up…
Who knows what you might
achieve then? The Survivor's Guide To The Credit Crunch January - May 2009 When winter comes and the temperature drops, you know that colds and flu are sure to follow. You know what your choices are; you can take supplements to boost your immune system or even have a flu jab to build protection against the virus. But what can you do to improve your personal resilience when the economy nose-dives and there is bad news wherever you look? Help is here... Please CLICK HERE to read the archived blogs (17 articles).
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The Bright Stuff Limited 2011 |
"Inspirational... compelling... transformational... it makes you stop and think differently"
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